Just find in the System Agents list, and disable it (uncheck Enabled). This is most easily accomplished with the utility Lingon. The first thing you should try when experiencing this problem is to simply turn Spotlight off then back on. i have temporarily used Onyx to stop the indexing." I should hasten to add that when in this mode, Time Machine fails to successfully achieve a backup. I have recently Archived and Reinstalled and found that this dealt with the problem in a sledgehammer sort of way, but then i ran Toast and the indexing started all over again. Even worse it has got to a stage where it is preparing to index, trying to estimate how long the index will take, and never gets past that.
#MAC OS X TERMINAL ENABLE SPOTLIGHT MAC OS X#
"Spotlight has been trying to index continually (since I updated to Mac OS X 10.5.2). MacFixIt reader Peter Ashworth recently detailed such a case: If they are using large amounts of CPU share and you're not currently performing a search, Spotlight is either indexing or has hung.
You can also check on Spotlight's status by launching Activity Monitor (located in /Applications/Utilities, organizing by process name, then inspecting mdworker and mds. If a progress bar is displayed, Spotlight is indexing.
You can generally check whether or not Spotlight is currently indexing by clicking the Spotlight menubar item (small magnifying glass in the upper-right portion of the screen). This can cause overall system slowness and other issues (in fact, this is a potential culprit to consider when you're experiencing otherwise inexplicable, poor performance). Spotlight (Mac OS X's search mechanism) can sometimes get stuck in a rut, endlessly indexing attached volumes.